Cisco Wireless WAN Reviews

The manageability and control are excellent. 

It is stable.

The solution scales well. 

We didn't have any issues setting it up.

Technical support was helpful. 

It needs to increase its strength in capacity. We'd like to cover more areas for WiFi accessibility.

We've been using the solution for more than ten years. It's been a long time. 

The stability has been good. there are no bugs or glitches and we haven't had issues with it crashing or freezing. It's reliable. 

The solution can scale if a company needs it to expand. 

We do want to expand usage. We're looking into 2025 already and are looking for what will meet our future requirements. 

Technical support has been good. We are satisfied with the level of support we receive. 

Positive

We've always used Cisco. We've used Cisco for a long time. However, we are looking for something that offers more features and more options. If that's Cisco, great, if that's something else, we are open to it. 

We also used Aruba and Ubiquiti in the past.

It's an easy initial setup. The process is straightforward. 

We have not witnessed any ROI.

We are a Cisco partner. 

This is a good product and we've had no issues with it. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

The most valuable feature of Cisco Wireless WAN is the ease of management.

We have had some problems connecting to the internet with Cisco Wireless WAN, but it is not the equipment or configuration. Additionally, the integration with access control security could improve.

I have been using Cisco Wireless WAN for approximately five years.

The support is useful and has helped us resolve issues we have had.

The setup of Cisco Wireless WAN is easy using the web interface.

I have a team that does the implementation and configuration of the solution.

I rate Cisco Wireless WAN a nine out of ten.

We're a higher ed campus. So, we have Cisco Wireless prevalent throughout all of our buildings for students, faculty, and staff to access the network.

We are using its latest version.

Reliability and visibility in the product are most valuable. We are able to see client performance, signal strength for clients, and things like that.

The cost and support should be improved, and there should be support for the 6E standard.

I have about 25 years of experience. 

Its stability is good.

Its scalability is good.

It's hit and miss with tech support. If you get a good engineer, things go well. Oftentimes, you'll get a new engineer or a first-line engineer who is not so good.

It was straightforward.

The cost of licensing should be improved.

My advice would be to negotiate the price as much as you can. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I'm a user, administrator, and implementer of Wireless WAN. I work in a large company and we use the system throughout our campus sites. We mainly use version 5508 and for smaller sites, we use 2504. There are more recent products but I don't have experience with them. We currently have 50,000 people using the Cisco Wireless WAN and have no plans for further expansion.

Improvement to our organization would be in terms of IoT, I would say, because some buildings are fully covered by WiFi. We're talking about large buildings of 60 access points per building. Users have benefited from full coverage and of course, that includes cell phones which also connect to WiFi, and using the guest wireless, and the ICP. Reduction in mobile data costs has allowed for increased savings, thanks to our corporate WiFi.

Valuable features for me would be the friendly GUI. It's not a feature as such but it's the first thing I would point out because troubleshooting is very easy on it. I can literally point down to a single host, find roughly where he's located and examine the strength of his connectivity. Also, I find the mobile anchoring to be handy although compared to the newer solutions it's a little old. 

Improvement could be made in the planning - WiFi survey and planning, and WiFi key mapping - should both be included in high-end devices. You would expect them to be included in such a product. When we bought it, 5508 was a high-end device. Some aspects could be achieved automatically by the wireless controller. For example, if there is a single access point deployed in a densely populated area, there will be many users and all those users bring down the speed. I think an option where the range of the access points is determined by the signal strength of the end-users would be good. There should be a mechanism mitigating that because when a user with a low WiFi signal connects, he basically crashes the experience for everyone else. Some automation on their part would be good.

A neat feature that some of the other vendors have is that of informing, where I can tell the access point to narrow down its signal and focus it in a specific direction. That is very handy, for example, in long corridors where you don't want the access point to spread its signal everywhere but rather focus it to a narrow field of vision, so to speak. That's a feature I would like to see. Vendors like Aruba have things like tracking mobile devices. That would also be a handy feature because it allows you to pinpoint areas that have low WiFi coverage. Another feature would be a dynamically generated heat map. Let's say you can see on a heat map where the user has been and can follow his WiFi experience in terms of signal to noise ratio, signal strength and the like as well as interference by other machines detected in that path, how the access points see each other and the strength of signal they're producing. The only thing missing is the piece of software that could show you that graphically.

I would like to see a centralized management where I don't need to log on to every controller and then proceed from there. Also, a centralized management for multiple wireless control deployments and, of course, features such as user tracking so I can pinpoint the user, all the way down to the wireless control access point and switch that the access point is connected to. 

It's a very stable device when used properly by people who know how to configure it; a high-end quality device. Recently some of the access points have started to break down but they are over 10 years old, which is quite good.

The product is very good quality with high scalability in my view.

We currently have around 10 people in our maintenance team

Prior to Cisco, we used Palo Alto. The switch was made to Cisco because we wanted to standardize the network throughout the company. 

The setup is relatively straightforward. To configure the controllers with prep time and IP address, would take a couple of hours, give or take.

I wasn't involved in the decision-making process about alternative options before we went with the Wireless WAN.

We use dedicated wireless control for our campuses in a redundant topology, active/passive. We use both Flex connect and local, essentially switched networks. Our company uses physical machines, not cloud-based wireless controls.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

We primarily use this product to provide general wireless network access.

The most valuable features are coverage and reliability.

The initial setup and deployment should be easier.

The technical support needs to be improved.

I have been working with Cisco Wireless WAN for between five and six years.

This is a fairly stable wireless solution.

This product is scalable, although we have no plans to increase our usage at the moment. We currently have 300 users.

I would rate the technical support a two out of five. It is an area that should be improved, in all aspects.

Neutral

I have used other similar products in the past, including HPE Wireless WAN and Ubiquity Wireless, but this Cisco product is one that the client already had in place.

The initial setup is complex, and I can't recall how long it took to deploy.

We installed it in-house. We have a team of three or four engineers that are responsible for maintenance.

We pay the licensing fees on a yearly basis.

In summary, this is not a product that I recommend.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

We use Cisco Wireless WAN to provide wireless WAN for our company.

I like that it's a very stable solution.

The price could be better.

I have been using Cisco Wireless WAN for more than four years.

Cisco Wireless WAN is very stable.

I think we used the smallest controller hardware solution, which was more than enough for us. But it's not scalable. It's okay because we don't have more access points.

The initial setup is straightforward. The initial deployment takes me about a day. We have to first set up the controller because it's a controller-based solution and then add access points from them. This will be determined automatically. The configuration is based on the controller and will be pushed to the access points automatically after they have been recognized.

I implemented this solution. 

The price could be better, but it's been okay. You must pay license fees for each access point connected to the controller.

I prefer the solution offered by Fortinet better.

I would tell potential users that it's a good solution if they plan to use more Cisco products. This is because it can be integrated into the entire network design.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco Wireless WAN an eight.

Cisco Wireless WAN is mainly used in campus networks, hotels, and other enterprise customers to provide wireless internet connectivity.

Cisco Wireless WAN's best features are simple management, the cloud base, dashboards, and reliability.

Cisco Wireless WAN could be improved by introducing a low-power wireless access point that could be installed in an outside environment. I would also like them to add an option without any licensing controller so that the customer could just purchase access points, then plug and play. In the future, Cisco Wireless WAN should include cloud control, centralized management, and branch connectivity.

I've been using Cisco Wireless WAN for around ten years.

Cisco Wireless WAN is perfectly stable. Some of our customers have been using it for eight to ten years without having to change the hardware as it continues to work perfectly.

There are some limitations with scaling the on-premises version - if you want to scale, you need to change the hardware and purchase a new wireless controller at an additional cost.

Cisco's technical support is very responsive, fast, and knowledgeable, with experienced and knowledgeable engineers.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy because so many engineers know the product, and Cisco makes a lot of technical documentation available via its online portal. I would rate the setup process as five out of five.

Cisco's licensing model includes some mandatory licenses, making it more expensive than other vendors like HP, Aruba, and Ruckus.

I would rate Cisco Wireless WAN ten out of ten.

We use Cisco Wireless WAN for our internal and guests users. We have recently migrated to the newest version of the solution.

The Cisco solution is good, the new GUI looks good and we are seeing more telemetry from it.

The new platform of Cisco Wireless WAN I did not like, there weren't many features available. The online platform has more options.

We found ourselves needing to integrate Cisco Wireless WAN with another Cisco product, called Cisco DNA, to try and receive more assurance on the data. It's another piece of hardware that you're putting onto your network. It could have been a cloud solution. Before Cisco, we used to have Cisco Prime which used to give us more in-depth analytics, such as heat maps of someone complaining about wireless access in a specific area. You could drill down into that, but you don't receive that information from the Cisco controller. We will receive the information if we implemented the DNAC solution, but it is another solution that we're implementing from Cisco. A competitor could probably do it in a better way reducing the need for multiple solutions.

Overall Cisco Wireless WAN could improve by giving more granular reporting and alerts back on issues and not having to integrate other tools onto the same platform. However, the platform is new, the interface is continually developing. Hopefully, they can improve quickly.

I have been using Cisco Wireless WAN for approximately 10 years.

I found the new version of Cisco Wireless WAN initially seemed to be quite buggy. However, the stability is good overall.

This model of Cisco Wireless WAN has good scalability. You can have ten of thousands of people using it.

We have approximately 4,000 users of this solution globally. The solution is used hourly.

The technical support from Cisco Wireless WAN is good. However, they were better before.

As people were transitioning to this Cisco Wireless WAN hardware, there wasn't as much available information online about different issues people might come across.

When determining if the implementation is going to be difficult it would depend on the topology of the sites. We're a global company, and on some of the sites where it was a standalone controller, it was straightforward to implement. However, on a different site when we were using the physical appliance, as a virtual wireless anchor that was in our own cloud, integrating that wasn't seamless.

We had help from the vendor when we were doing the implementation.

We have one person that does the maintenance and patching of the solution.

The price of Cisco Wireless WAN could improve upon pricing, it is expensive. We purchased the hardware through a vendor that Cisco used and we received approximately 75 percent off.

We are on a three-year license with Cisco Wireless WAN.

We evaluated the Cisco Meraki solution before we made the decision to choose the on-premise solution. One reason we choose the on-premise solution is we were already using one. When choosing which one is better, it is difficult because I did not use Cisco Meraki extensively to determine which one is best.

Since we have recently migrated to the new version of the Cisco Wireless WAN platform the interface has changed and I'm still getting used to it.

I would recommend Cisco Wireless WAN. However, that's because my exposure is to Cisco Wireless. I'm probably a little bit biased. Overall, it's a fairly good solution.

Whether this solution is suitable or not for a company depends on their deployment, if they were a Greenfield-sized company or a Brownfield-sized company I would have different tips. It does fully depend on the scenario. My key advice is with a wireless solution is for them to do a wireless survey first before purchasing.

I rate Cisco Wireless WAN an eight out of ten.